1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a blade server system. More particularly, the present invention relates to an expandable storage apparatus for a blade server system.
2. Description of Related Art
With the rapid development of various technologies and the pervasiveness of computer dependency in enterprise, the market demand for server systems is rising. Due to the growth in business, larger companies usually use tens of or hundreds of low-cost servers or blade servers in order to deal with a great number of data or Internet traffic. The so-called “Server Blade” refers to an entire server designed to fit on a small plug-and-play card or board (CPUs, RAM or hard drives are usually included thereon). A server blade represents a server. Several blades can be installed in one rack, sharing the same power supplies, monitor, keyboard and other electronic components while offering potentially easier maintenance. Several servers can be further set in a rack chassis, integrating all server blades while enabling users to efficiently and rapidly access them.
Blade servers are notable for their reliability and scalability. Since the server rack and the blade server are designed to be hot-swappable, when one of the blade servers is out of service, the blade server can be simply removed without shutting down the system. In other words, blade servers can replace much larger, more traditional server installations, allowing the consolidation of sprawling server farms into a few super-dense racks. Meanwhile, the computing capacity is also increased if more blade servers are included and properly used.
Although the blade server is provided with hard drive(s) for storing information, storage capabilities are limited by the size of the drive. Modern applications require increasingly large storage areas to store data and associated information. To increase the overall storage capacity, blade server systems are typically connected to independent storage system(s) for better storage capabilities, which might, however, result in unnecessary lines and occupy too much space. In addition, for most smaller enterprises, a blade server rack (for example, a rack with 14 slots in which three to five blade servers were used may be sufficient to fully handle the required processes. However, the remaining 9 slots would thus be left idle—while an external storage system is still needed.